Concrete cracks at Fox Lane put gym off limits

By JEFF MORRIS

Cracks in the concrete underlying the Fox Lane High School gym will force the building to be off limits to everyone for the foreseeable future.

The discovery, revealed at Wednesday’s reorganizational meeting of the Bedford Central Board of Education, was made during work being done to replace the gym floor as part of the district’s ongoing construction bond project.

Representatives of project manager Arris Contracting and BBS Architects, along with the district’s Director of Facilities Tim Walsh, and director of health, physical education and athletics, Adam Lodewick, were all on hand to explain the situation and its ramifications.

Removing the wooden playing surface in the Fox Lane High School gym revealed cracks in the concrete floor running the length of the room, PHOTOS COURTESY OF BCSD

It was Superintendent Robert Glass who delivered the news that once the gym floor was demolished a week earlier, “some structural issues were found,” he said.

Trustee Steven Matlin said the issue came up after they had held the last construction committee meeting.

The contractor had been directed to remove the existing gym floor in preparation for installation of a new one, as was called for in the contract. Once they started cleaning the concrete underneath, cracks were discovered. These did not seem to be significant at first, but when they checked the basement, they found the cracks were going straight through the concrete.

An engineering firm was called and deployed early the next morning to do a site analysis. 

By Friday morning they had a written report, indicating the cracks appeared to be much wider than what was noticed above.

Because there was no work being done in the basement as part of the bond project, there had previously been no attention paid to the underside of the floor.

The high school gym was built in 1955, and as far as anybody involved in the current work could tell, the floor had never been replaced. The contractor and others who viewed the conditions once the flooring was removed were also perplexed by what they found, as they said it was lacking a base underneath and the concrete below it was rough, which they had “never seen before.”

Preliminary analysis seemed to indicate that the cracking was old, and probably occurred 30 to 50 years ago, though the engineers do not yet know that for sure. A point made by Matlin was that the problem would not have been noticed if the gym floor had not been removed.

Next steps

John Prentice of BBS said core samples of the concrete have to be taken, and Arris has been asked to reach out to a shoring company so the floor can be shored up temporarily. The shoring, he said, can be made to accommodate either 100 pounds per square inch, or 50 pounds per square inch. The former would allow the building to be occupied, while the latter would allow workers to go back into the building.

An inspection of the coffered underside of the floor, above, showed mutliple cracks as well.

After some discussion by the board, it was clear that nobody saw much point to using the stronger shoring, since extensive work to effectuate a permanent fix would be needed and it would not make sense to replace the gym floor first.

A rough estimate of the cost to put shoring in place was in the ballpark of $325,000 to $350,000, plus rental of the shoring every month. Asked if there was a significant difference in cost between the two shoring strengths, Prentice said there was not.

The architect estimated the gym would be offline for a year; he foresaw the need for shoring to be replaced with another structural system, and a design and build process that could take eight months. He saw work continuing to the end of the calendar year at a minimum and into next year. But he said the engineers can’t determine what needs to be done until completion of a forensic study.

“We don’t have a fix, and we don’t have a cause yet,” Prentice said. “We need a couple of more meetings.”

Board President Gilian Klein said she had confidence the situation would be dealt with and fixed, and she didn’t care so much about forensics; her focus was on what is essentially a safety issue that needs to be solved. She noted that, based on the estimate, the cost of installing and renting shoring for a year would be around $1 million, and the actual solution probably another million, so they’re going to need in the neighborhood of one to two million dollars. She said they need the best and most cost effective solution.

There was some good news, in that the small and large locker rooms that had just been renovated appeared to be unaffected, as they had a different type of floor, and the small gym is in a separate building. However, installing shoring is going to take up space in the maintenance shop and boiler room, and there is an unexcavated dirt area used for storage under the gym that will need to be cleared out. 

Contingency planning

With the gym apparently off limits for a year, discussion turned to the need for a contingency plan for physical education, which Lodewick said he would be working on; it was mentioned that transportation could also be affected. 

The remaining question was how the district was going to pay for the work. Matlin said there is not enough money left from the construction bond, though there was probably about $1 million they could safely use from contingencies in the bond fund. However, it was noted that the shoring is going to eat up a lot of those contingencies before they even get to the rebuild.

Asked if there were any emergency capital grants available, Assistant Superintendent for Business and Operations Jose Formoso said there were none that he knew of, but he would look into it.

Though the board was not yet prepared to discuss possibly removing items from the bond project, one item that they took action on immediately, which had coincidentally been on their radar, was to vote to remove the canopy planned for Fox Lane Middle School from the scope of the bond. There had been complications with hitting rock during construction that would have significantly added to the cost, and it was decided not to move ahead; that could save $350,000.

There was additional discussion of possible alternative gym sites and reciprocal agreements with neighboring municipalities and institutions, and the need for busing and other additional costs; more meetings will be taking place.

“Lots of moving parts,” said Klein. “Updates to come.”